Large Format Digital Printing (1 Viewer)

I took some amazing timed exposure digital pictures in Carlsbad Caverns, and want to print at least one to poster size. I've been looking online, and one of the best deals I found was Costco, who will print 20x30 posters for $8.

I don't need breathtaking quality, and the camera is only 6 megapixels, but I would like it to be accurate to the image I took.. I will probably build an inexpensive frame for the poster, myself.

Is this the best deal, or is Costco's poster printing to be avoided?

A friend of mine printed up a poster I designed through Costco, and the quality is very good. However, my design was a montage of LA movie theater marquees, not a single shot blown up. If you've got the resolution, I'd say go for it.

Cool. I have heard about some sort of fractal plugin for Photoshop that allows really good enlargements without pixelization. Do you think something like that would be worth persuing as well? I am increasing the size of my image about four times in order to do this print.

For the price (so cheap) I would get one each at costco, mpix and whcc.com and see if you can live with the costco quality or if the services that a custom lab like whcc bring to the table are worth paying to have all yours done up that size.

I'm not familiar with the Photoshop plugin you mentioned, so I can't help you there.

I use "Genuine Fractals." It's interesting software, and I look forward to the day when it could be applied to real time video.

Anyways, you shouldn't need that for your poster. 6MP will do fine. I could enlarge it for you though if you'd like to see what you'd get.

My experience has been: let the lab you are using do your upconversion for you.

I upped it in Corel Photo Paint and uploaded it to the Costco system. It will be ready today by one, so it is a $9 experiment that will soon be concluded.

Zack, I may take you up on that if this doesn't work, or possibly for a future attempt. If I like the poster, I plan to print more for family members, so a second version using Genuine Fractals would be a great comparison.

The printed result looked great. I strive for accuracy in color reproduction from my monitors on down, so it looked basically the same as on my screen.

I still want to go back for more photos, but so far I am happy. Thanks, guys!